Canyon Name Origins – Sutton Canyon, Mullally Canyon

Two large canyons feed into Pickens Canyon from the east side, and both have histories involving logging. The uppermost canyon is Sutton Canyon. It’s visible looking across Pickens Canyon from Briggs Terrace at the intersection of Manzanita and Canyonside. Sadly, we don’t know the origin of its name. There is one hiking website that describes hiking up the trail-less canyon, bush-whacking and climbing cliff-faces the entire way. Sutton Canyon is huge, and funnels a lot of water into Pickens Canyon.

Mullally Canyon feeds into Pickens Canyon a little lower down, actually crossing under Ocean View Boulevard near the top. It’s visible from the end of Manistee Drive, turning right off Ocean View. The housing development called Paradise Canyon at the top of Ocean View was constructed over the top on Mullally Canyon, and a drainpipe was laid underneath the new development to handle runoff coming down Mullally. That drainpipe proved inadequate in the 1970s and again in 2010 when floodwaters coming down Mullally jumped the drainpipe and flowed instead down Ocean View all the way to Montrose, damaging scores of homes.

Like many of the canyons, logging was one of the first American activities in Sutton and Mullally canyons. And just like Goss Canyon to the west, Mullally Canyon is named for a brick manufacturer in Los Angeles. Tom Goss was the largest brick manufacturer, producing in 1887 an amazing 100,000 bricks a day. Joseph Mullally was not even a close second at 40,000 bricks a day.

Brickmaking in the 1800s required lots of wood. Deposits of natural clay ran through downtown LA, so creating the bricks was easy. Thousands of raw bricks were placed in beehive shaped kilns and wood was fed into them to burn and harden the bricks. While clay was easily had, wood for the fires was not, so teams of Chinese loggers (overseen, of course, by white men) were sent to the mountains to log out the big cone Douglas fir trees that populated the canyons.

In the Crescenta Valley, wood for the Goss brickyards was had from Goss Canyon, while Mullally Canyon supplied wood for the Mullally brickyards. In Mullally Canyon the logging operation was on an industrial scale. Starting in the 1870s, teams of Chinese loggers climbed into the canyon each summer and felled the 100-foot trees from the steep, treacherous sides of the canyon. They built a wooden tramway snaking down the canyon and ending on Briggs Terrace. Four-foot lengths of trees weighing hundreds of pounds were loaded onto small train cars and run down the tramway to waiting wagons at the bottom. This went on summer after summer into the 1890s until all the trees were gone.

Joseph Mullally, the namesake of Mullally Canyon, came to Los Angeles in 1854 as a brick maker. Before the 1870s, the vast majority of brick buildings in LA were of Mullally bricks. Many downtown streets were paved with Mullally bricks. Some, stamped “J.Mullally,” are still there under the modern asphalt. Other brick companies, like Tom Goss’, moved in to take advantage of the clay deposits in the downtown area and by the 1890s LA had many brick factories.

Mullally, like Goss, got his name in the paper often as he was heavily involved in city politics. But one article in particular was of a more personal nature. In 1885, Mullally was at work in his brickyard just above today’s Chinatown. His wife, who he had recently divorced and whose house had just recently burned down (coincidence?), showed up at his brickyard with another female friend. The ex-wife picked up a brick and beat Mullally over the head and back with it. He grabbed her, threw her down and jumped on top of her. The friend threw a rope around Mullally’s neck and throttled him. He broke free and was pelted with bricks by the two angry ladies for several minutes, until he finally got out of range by running away. The police showed up and, after a spirited fight, arrested the ex-Mrs. Mullally.

Ah yes, the good old days when folks were civil to one another!

  mike lawler